Movement

Movement

For the past few weeks I have been inspired by the concept I developed for the PlatAfrica 2018 Competition and I have been working on ways to incorporate movement into my work. The Ring that I designed for the competition consisted of many simple petals that were looped through half jump rings connected to the surface of the ring, this allowed each petal to move freely with the movement of the wearer’s hand. Movement, development or growth can be metaphorically expressed through nature or something organic.  Picture leaves quivering in the wind, a sped up clip of a seed germinating or a dead animal decaying in the field. These three images express movement, development and growth.

The most important concept that I have been working on recently is movement. I have been developing a way or technique to involve movement into my jewellery pieces and this concept was developed from my plat Africa piece. During this project, I developed a technique of incorporating movement into my jewellery pieces but I felt that the technique that I was following was not perfect so I continued to develop my ideas. This led me to come up with the idea of concealing the hinge system (the previous system involved a visible jump ring that acted as a hinge) so I came up with the idea of sliding each petal through a thin slit cut out onto a surface and creating a stop from behind so that it is not visible. Below is a close up picture of my slit system. I cut out multiple petals out of silver and I cut multiple slits into a domed surface and combined these petals in a random pattern.

Having completed my first prototype, I now have a clearer understanding of my new concept and how I can improve on it. Overall I can see that this concept has beautiful movement and the potential to be taken further, however I must definitely work on my petal arrangement and the length of the slits to create a neater finished piece. The arrangement that I chose did not look visually appealing because petals were pointing in many different directions and all were different sizes, I will stick to using the same size petal in future. The next step for me is to produce more prototypes to refine the process further.